driving through slovakia.
driving from budapest to prague.
and they still have borders in eastern europe.
i remember the days when they would stop you at borders in western europe. and now western europe is basically borderless.
with one currency (for the most part).
and, selfishly speaking, it’s great.
well, great from the perspective of a touring musician for whom borders just slow down what’s usually an already long trip.
like now.
we get to stop at the border of hungary and slovakia. and then we get to stop at the border of slovakia and the czech republic. and then tomorrow night we get to stop at the border of poland and the czech republic.
fun fun fun.
see, borders are not romantic places.
they’re parking lots, basically.
with angry border police.
some of the more annoying borders in the world are:
the border between the uk and the rest of europe (even though the uk is a member of the ec).
and the border between canada and the u.s. boy, that’s an annoying border crossing. and for some reason the canadian border police tend to be a lot tougher than the u.s border police. even after september 11th. canadian border police think nothing of waking up a bus full of sleeping musicians at 4 in the morning and making them stand in the cold for an hour while they ransack the bus. sometimes it’s longer than an hour. every touring musician invariably has a nightmarish canadian border crossing story that involves standing in the parking lot for 8 hours while the border police look under every mattress and behind every piece of audio equipment.
i mean, forgive me for stating the obvious, but if you were going to smuggle something into canada wouldn’t you do it where there are no border police? i mean the u.s and canada have, i believe, the longest and most porous border in the world.
wouldn’t a smuggler just say, ‘oh, there’s the border crossing with border police, huh, i’ll just go 50 miles in either direction and walk across without any trouble’?
or they could fly. or boat. or etc. it just seems that if you’re bound and determined to get into canada from the u.s (or vice versa) that it really can’t be all that difficult, what with thousands of unguarded miles of border. the point of which is, i guess, that the canadian border police should stop making poor little musicians stand in cold parking lots for 8 hours.
musicians aren’t drug dealers or terrorists (for the most part). the only contraband that most musicians will occasionally try to sneak into canada would be some undeclared t-shirts, or maybe an old pipe.
having said all this, we’re still stuck at the slovakian border.
and like i said earlier, fun fun fun.
the glamorous life of the touring musician. maybe after the border crossing we’ll stop at a slovakian truck stop and stock up on stuffed animals and gummi bears.
see, the fun never stops.
one interesting fact about a lot of european truck stops is that many of them serve alcohol, and some even have bars.
it really inspires great trust and confidence in me to see a bunch of truck drivers having a few drinks at a truck stop before piling into their 18 wheelers.
ok, i’m done being a curmudgeon.
thanks,
moby